By the time the Stanley Cup final rolls around, the overwhelming majority of people interested—whether they’re fans or people who make their living in the hockey business—are watching on television.
Therefore, what happens on the screen is pretty important if you’re interested in growing and expanding interest in the game, which the NHL purports to be attempting.
That said, the final opened Monday on CBC and Versus and for those who don’t have the opportunity to view the latter production, a review might be in order.

Ottawa’s downfall in the 3-2 loss to the Ducks on Monday night was because of turnovers and the big line’s inability to perform any of the offensive magic that led the team this far.
Poor ice conditions probably contributed somewhat to the latter, if not the former.
“It’s like you’re playing with a tennis ball,” Corvo said of attempts to get anything done in the off-day, on-ice workout. “(The ice) is bad and it’s chippy. The puck doesn’t want to stay flat.
“It’s unbelievable.”

“I don’t see this as a challenge. I see this as a great opportunity,” said Maloney, who had three years remaining on his contract in New York.
“This organization knows what it wants and it knows what it wants to be. We’re going to be hungry. We’re going to build from the ground up, and that’s the only way for long-term success. It’s going to take a lot of patience, a lot of hard work. For one thing, we won’t get outworked either on the ice and we certainly won’t be outworked off the ice.”
Maloney said his priorities will be to find a No. 1 goalie, preferably one who’s considered among the top 10 in the league, and plug in the many holes up front. Of the players under contract, only Shane Doan and Steven Reinprecht are considered legitimate topsix forwards.
And the Coyotes’ payroll won’t be bumping the salary cap as it did the past two seasons.

This won’t go over well with Sabres fans — particularly the die-hards who can’t bring themselves to take the flags off their cars. But if I were a betting man, I’d wager that neither Chris Drury nor Daniel Briere will be playing hockey for Buffalo next season.
My suspicions were heightened by the news that the Sabres won’t be able to spend up to the NHL salary cap next season. The cap is expected to rise from $44 million to at least $48 million. Judging from the comments by owner Tom Golisano, there’s a greater chance that the Sabres will spend less in payroll next year than in the season just past.

Predictably, the Ducks defended what they do.
“We’re going hard to the net and we’re going to go try and score goals,” said Ducks center Ryan Getzlaf, who got the tying goal in Monday’s 3-2 victory. “We’re definitely not trying to do anything to provoke him or injure him, by any means.
“I think we’re going into those dirty areas, and when there’s loose pucks, we’re going to try to put them in the net.”

They have no nickname — Ducks, surely, is bad enough — but Bruce Hood says he couldn’t stop thinking that, somehow, the Broad Street Bullies were back in the Stanley Cup final.
Not the Ottawa Senators versus the Anaheim Ducks, as advertised. But the 2007 Ottawa Senators up against the Philadelphia Flyers, circa mid-1970s.
Hood is not as lost in time as it might appear. Something happened to the “new NHL” on Monday during Anaheim’s 3-2 victory. It became the “old NHL.” Or the “new new NHL,” where obstruction appears to have been welcomed back.

Yearning to “break free of these chains” binding him to the Wild, goalie Manny Fernandez expects to be traded this summer and said Tuesday he wants to play for more supportive coaches and teammates than he has had in Minnesota.
With his bags packed for a transaction that might not occur, Fernandez said he has been “fighting against some demons” since the Wild acquired him before their inaugural 2000-01 season and is ready to move on with his $9.25 million contract.

Updated at 0530 EST because I love the run-on sentence and thought I was the king of it, especially used in times of emotional duress, but now realize I’m just a frigging pawn in the big run-on scheme of things when compared to Steph at No Pun Intended who—based on the Pronger rant posted below—is truly the master.

According to former Deep Digger captain Ted Kulfan, our Miracle of Insanity met with the Boy Wonder yesterday and all the expected bribery, begging and ass kissing took place.

Now, right now it is more media speculation suggesting he’d be a good fit with the Red Wings, but it’s not out of the question. Before he re-signed with the Thrashers in 2003, Kozlov was interested in returning to Detroit but the Red Wings never made an offer. If they’re interested in the veteran winger this time around, I think they’d have to be the front-runner.

The CBC’s telecast of the first game of the Stanley Cup final on Monday (Senators-Anaheim Ducks) drew an average audience of 2.608 million, down 14 per cent from the first game last year (Oilers-Carolina Hurricanes, 3.033 million).
The audience was off 15 per cent from the 3.063 million viewers who watched the first game of the 2004 final between the Flames and Tampa Bay Lightning….
In the United States, Versus did not receive a national rating Tuesday, but regionally, Buffalo produced the largest overnight, a 3.9 (percentage of households tuned in).
The Los Angeles market, where the Ducks play, produced a 1.7, the largest hockey rating Versus has earned in the market. Versus ranked fifth among the cable networks in Los Angeles from 8 p.m. EDT to 10:45 p.m.

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